Neville Chamberlain and Donald Trump

Sandy Levinson

Neville Chamberlain actually remained Prime Minister until the disastrous invasion of Norway by Germany and the almost complete loss of confidence in his capacity to lead the British nation.  He was, obviously, succeeded by Winston Churchill.  And this occurred, just as obviously, without an election:  There were no elections between 1935 and 1945, when Churchill, in a magnificent display of democratic decisionmaking, was ousted from office and replaced by Clement Attlee, who immediately flew to Potsdam and replaced Churchill at the conference with Truman and Stalin.

So compare our own situation, when we are facing the greatest domestic crisis since World War II (in retrospect, September 11 was a stunning gutpunch from which the country recovered relatively easily). The President is a completely incompetent near-sociopath who cannot possibly be trusted to be telling the truth about the most easily verifiable information.  Nor, of course, does he wish to take responsibility for anything "his" Administration has done.  A truly rational political system would have a way of deposing him and replacing him with someone in whom we had sufficient confidence to make what are truly Draconian (or, ideally, Solomonic) decisions that really touch on who shall live and who shall die.  Impeachment, it is clear beyond reasonable doubt, does not work, not least, as I've tiresomely argued, because it has been captured by lawyers who want to parse the meaning of "high Crimes and Misdemeanors," which is really beside the point when a political system is facing a genuine near-existential crisis.  Chamberlain committed no crimes, and one can even understand his relentless desire to prevent another disastrous war; that turned out to be utterly irrelevant after September 1, 1939, though in fact Chamberlain did get another year.

I find it truly incredible that any reasonable person has genuine confidence in Donald Trump at the present time.  It is not a question of replacing him with Joe Biden, which I of course hope happens in November (though we will then be afflicted with waiting an excruciating eleven weeks for Biden's inauguration, thanks to our awful Constitution).  I would gladly replace him with, say, Mitt Romney, someone actually skilled in the administrative arts and, all things considered, trustworthy to make decisions on the basis of his understanding of the public interest.

To continue to ignore the extent to which the Constitution is a major part of our crisis is the equivalent of ignoring all of the social distancing advice and choosing instead to go to a bar because it is so frustrating to spend itme alone.  I can understand both impulses, but each can, in its own way, turn out to be disastrous.
Posted 11:36 AM by Sandy Levinson [link]